If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, you need to be a participant, not just a listener.

Five months after we are conceived, music begins to capture our attention and wire our brains for a lifetime of aural experience. At the other end of life, musical memories can be imprinted on the brain so indelibly that they can be retrieved, perfectly intact, from the depths of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer's disease.

In between, music can puncture stress, dissipate anger and comfort us in sadness.

As if all that weren't enough, for years parents have been seduced by even loftier promises from an industry hawking the recorded music of Mozart and other classical composers as a means to ensure brilliant babies.

But for all its beauty, power and capacity to move, researchers have concluded that music is little more than ear candy for the brain if it is consumed only passively. If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you'll need more than hype and a loaded iPod.

You gotta get in there and play. Or sing, bang or pluck.

"The Mozart effect? That's just crap," says Glenn Schellenberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who conducts research on the effect of music and musical instruction.

Even the author of the 1993 study that set off the commercial frenzy says her group's findings — from an experiment that had college students, not babies, listen to Mozart — were "grossly misapplied and over-exaggerated." Psychologist Frances Rauscher, along with the rest of the field studying music's effects on the brain, has long since moved on to explore the effect of active musical instruction on cognitive performance.

The upshot of their work is clear: Learning to make music changes the brain and boosts broad academic performance. Findings across the board suggest that, even for a kid who will not grow up to be a Wynton Marsalis or a Joshua Bell, spending money and time on music lessons and practice is a solid investment in mental fitness.

Entrepreneur Don Campbell, dubbed the "P.T. Barnum of the Mozart effect," has built a thriving online business selling CDs with names like "Mozart to Go" to enhance children's creativity and school performance. And, Campbell says on his website, parents of children with dyslexia, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder should buy his CDs to improve their children's neuropsychiatric conditions.

Wolfgang Amadeus is not the only composer beloved by entrepreneurs promising smarter children. Internet sites offer fretful new parents a range of slow, synthesized music by other musical greats, including J.S. Bach, Haydn and Vivaldi.

A "Baroque-a-bye Baby CD," its cover showing a blissed-out baby clamped into earphones and a slant seat, promises that its musical offerings will mimic mother's heartbeat at 60 beats per minute, offering "mathematical perfection and symmetry" designed to "stimulate your child's brain."

If only basking in surround sound were enough. The effect of listening to beloved classical music is at best small, fleeting and — with all deference to the late-18th century musical genius — not even unique to Mozart, Schellenberg says.

True, listening to music we like — whether it's hip-hop, show tunes or Schubert — does makes us feel good. Positive mood, in turn, increases focus and attention, which improves performance on many tests of mental sharpness. In some, but not all, studies, that includes improvements in the kind of mental skills we use in doing complex math problems, interpreting driving directions and pondering how to fit a large bookcase in the trunk of a small car.

But the performance-enhancing effect, Schellenberg says, lingers for no more than about 10 minutes after the music stops.

Learning to play, he has found, is a far better bet. In a 2004 study, he and his colleagues randomly assigned 144 6-year-olds to receive instruction in keyboard, voice, drama or nothing. After a year, kids who got keyboard or voice lessons showed a 3-point IQ boost on average over the kids taking drama or no lessons at all.

It's a modest improvement but one that may build on itself since, for all its faults, IQ is a reliable predictor of a child's performance in school. Better performance in school typically leads to more and better schooling — which, in turn, further increases IQ.